Sic transit Gloria

Gloria Steinem in her heyday

It won’t be news to readers of this website that Kim Jung-un presides over a country that can fairly be compared not just to a prison – that’s far too mild an analogy – but to an extermination camp. Terror and torture, arbitrary arrests and executions, the total denial of civil rights and absence of any kind of freedom, a society perpetually starving, thoroughly saturated in propaganda, utterly cut off from the outside world, and armed to the teeth, its mad leader constantly rattling his saber: this is North Korea today. There’s only one way, of course, to bring an end to this nightmare: bring in Gloria Steinem.

On May 24, the feminist icon led a group of 30 or so women on a “walk for peace” across the border between the two Koreas, starting in the north and crossing to the south. “Our purpose,” she told the Washington Post, was “to call attention to this unresolved conflict that I suspect most people or many people have forgotten.” She and her fellow activists were going to North Korea “to listen and learn, to say we care by being physically present” because there’s “no substitute for putting your bodies where your concerns are” and “conflicts are far more likely to be solved when people sit down together.”

Steinem and her fellow activists at a pre-event press conference in Beijing

Yes, that’s the way to solve the North Korea dilemma: we need to “sit down” with Kim’s henchmen so we can “listen and learn.” Learn what? Asked whether she planned “to address women’s/human rights issues” while in North Korea, she replied: “Yes, we will say what our experience is and ask what their experience is and hope that one informs the other.” As if any North Koreans were free to say anything honest about “their experience”! Could Steinem’s entire premise be more naive, more misguided? “It’s hard to imagine any more physical symbol of the insanity of dividing human beings,” she said about the DMZ – as if the root problem were the division itself, and not Kim’s totalitarianism.

Steinem and pals crossing the border

The title of Lizzie Crocker’s article in the Daily Beast asked the right question: “Is Gloria Steinem a Propaganda Tool For North Korea?” Crocker noted that Steinem and her co-leader in the “walk for peace,” Korean-American activist Christine Ahn, were “calling on the UN to broker a peace treaty between the North and South, and asking the U.S. to lift sanctions against the North,” but had said nothing about the “executions, rape, forced starvation, and enslavement” for which the Kim regime is responsible; indeed, Steinem’s statements had “been decidedly anodyne.”